Related papers: CapablePtrs: Securely Compiling Partial Programs U…
Developing secure distributed systems is difficult, and even harder when advanced cryptography must be used to achieve security goals. Following prior work, we advocate using secure program partitioning to synthesize cryptographic…
This article describes the development and formal verification (proof of semantic preservation) of a compiler back-end from Cminor (a simple imperative intermediate language) to PowerPC assembly code, using the Coq proof assistant both for…
Universal Composability (UC) is the gold standard for cryptographic security, but mechanizing proofs of UC is notoriously difficult. A recently-discovered connection between UC and Robust Compilation (RC)$\unicode{x2014}$a novel theory of…
Memory corruption attacks have been prevalent in software for a long time. Some mitigation strategies against these attacks do exist, but they are not as far-reaching or as efficient as the CHERI architecture. CHERI uses capabilities to…
Assurance Cases (ACs) are an established approach in safety engineering to argue quality claims in a structured way. In the context of quality assurance for Machine Learning (ML)-based software components, ACs are also being discussed and…
Weird machines---the computational models accessible by exploiting security vulnerabilities---arise from the difference between the model a programmer has in her head of how her program should run and the implementation that actually…
Modern processors include high-performance cryptographic functionalities such as Intel's AES-NI and ARM's Pointer Authentication that allow programs to efficiently authenticate data held by the program. Pointer Authentication is already…
Verified compilation of open modules (i.e., modules whose functionality depends on other modules) provides a foundation for end-to-end verification of modular programs ubiquitous in contemporary software. However, despite intensive…
Several open-source memory allocators have been ported to CHERI, a hardware capability platform. In this paper we examine the security and performance of these allocators when run under CheriBSD on Arm's experimental Morello platform. We…
While memory corruption bugs stemming from the use of unsafe programming languages are an old and well-researched problem, the resulting vulnerabilities still dominate real-world exploitation today. Various mitigations have been proposed to…
The Universal Composability model (UC) by Canetti (FOCS 2001) allows for secure composition of arbitrary protocols. We present a quantum version of the UC model which enjoys the same compositionality guarantees. We prove that in this model…
As we have entered Exascale computing, the faults in high-performance systems are expected to increase considerably. To compensate for a higher failure rate, the standard checkpoint/restart technique would need to create checkpoints at a…
Memory safety in C and C++ remains largely unresolved. A technique usually called "memory tagging" may dramatically improve the situation if implemented in hardware with reasonable overhead. This paper describes two existing implementations…
Existing high-end embedded systems face frequent security attacks. Software compartmentalization is one technique to limit the attacks' effects to the compromised compartment and not the entire system. Unfortunately, the existing…
Proving secure compilation of partial programs typically requires back-translating an attack against the compiled program to an attack against the source program. To prove back-translation, one can syntactically translate the target…
Crary and Sullivan's Relaxed Memory Calculus (RMC) proposed a new declarative approach for writing low-level shared memory concurrent programs in the presence of modern relaxed-memory multi-processor architectures and optimizing compilers.…
Memory-safety violations in C and C++ programs continue to enable sophisticated exploitation techniques such as control-flow hijacking and data-oriented attacks. Existing hardware defenses either rely on address space layout randomization…
The paper introduces the development of a modular compiler for a subset of a C-like language, which addresses the challenges in constructing a compiler for high-level languages. This modular approach will allow developers to modify a…
Memory-unsafe programming languages such as C and C++ are the preferred languages for systems programming, embedded systems, and performance-critical applications. The widespread use of these languages makes the risk of memory-related…
Compiler optimizations are designed to improve run-time performance while preserving input-output behavior. Correctness in this sense does not necessarily preserve security: it is known that standard optimizations may break or weaken…